In project two my team created a board game called "War of the Wizard Kings". In this board game, you had to take control of territory on the board by casting spells with your spell cards. Fortunately for us, we had a bunch of very talented artists helping us create the cards.

After our external play test, we got a lot of really good feedback from our testers ranging from game play improvements to card improvements. The most feed back we got was about our amazing artwork on our cards. One thing we noticed with this feedback was that the earth cards were a little bit hard to read. After looking into it a bit, we discovered that the only reason it was hard to read was because of CMYK.

CMYK is the colour model that printers use. Printers use the base colours cyan, magenta, yellow and key (or black) to do all their printing. The reason that the text looked fine on the computer was because monitors use the colour model of RGB (red, green, blue) which allows monitors to reproduce millions more colours. Unfortunately for printers, because they are using CMYK, the colours they can produce is a lot less. If you want to read more about it, I found this website that explains the difference between the two quite well.

Fortunately, I know the basics of Photoshop, so I made some changes to one of the earth cards to try and make it easier to read. Here is a before and after of the cards.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The first card is the original card with a green background and in the colour model of RGB. When it was printed, the text was really hard to read because the printer couldn't properly print the 2 different shades of green. The second card is the one I changed. I changed the colour model to CMYK, then changed the background of the card to a dark brown, which I think matches the Earth theme a little bit better than the green. I kept the text colour the same so it would stand out on the dark brown background.

I haven't had the card printed yet, but the card being saved in CMYK would mean the printed version will look similar to what I can see on the screen. Overall I am happy with the improvements I made, and think it adds to the earth theme that the cards have.